Beyond Linux From Scratch - Version 6.1

KDE

Introduction to KDE

KDE is a comprehensive desktop
environment that builds on an X Window
System and Qt to provide a
window manager and many user tools, including a browser, word
processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, games, and numerous
other utilities. It provides extensive capabilities for
customization.

The KDE instructions are divided
into two parts. The first part, the core packages, are needed for
the rest of KDE to work. The
second part presents additional packages which provide
functionality in various areas (multimedia, graphics, etc.).

There are two alternatives for installing KDE. Option one, that is used by most of the
commercial distributions, is to install KDE in the standard system prefix: /usr. This option allows the use of KDE without the need for any additional
configuration such as modification of various environment variables
or configuration files. Option two is to install it in a unique
prefix such as /opt/kde or /opt/kde-3.4.1. This option allows for easy removal
of the package.

Tip

All the KDE packages are
comprised of various components. The default is to install most
of the components. If specific components are to be eliminated,
the official way is to set the variable DO_NOT_COMPILE. This comes in handy when there are
problems compiling a particular component.

The core KDE packages also
honor this variable, but omitting components from the core
packages is not advisable since it may result in an incomplete
KDE installation.

Note

In each of the packages, one other option to
configure can be
added: --enable-final. This option can
speed up the build process, but requires a lot of memory. If
you have less than 256MB of RAM, this option may cause swapping
and significantly slow compilation.